Backup strategy advice needed - NAS/SAN/Help !??!!

I'm looking for some friendly advice on what approach our company should be taking for the 'next level' of storage.

We are about 70 strong company, but very data intensive - Exchange, SQL Servers, etc ...

We run pretty damn good servers here - i've upgraded recently to rackmount DL380's with built-in DAT drives. We always tend to run the latest HP hardware, as a rule.

However, storage always presents a problem ... for example, soon I intend to implement Exchange 'live archiving' tools and I am finding myself shorter and shorter of storage space ... obviously keeping these on RAID5 live servers is going to prove quite expensive !

So what are people using as their big, scaleable, storage solutions for non-live (but accessable) ,archive data etc ... i'm baffled by all the SAN, NAS talk ... but I know that I want something pretty big (200gig+) and scalable. Also, what do you back that lot up on ??

I've had to swallow some pride to ask all these questions - I should know I guess ... but as a SME that's grown from 2 people, you just have to find out about these things as you go along !

So, if anyone here has got any links, advice and pointers, i'll split up the points accordingly.

As far as i can c, u are big corporation and need u your data to be safe.
and i think, that the right strategy is to back it up.
u ll need backup server soft.
we are using True Image Enterprise Server 9.1,

NOT AT ALL. RAid 5 was last decades choice, and it turns out to be not able to handle failures very well. Get bigger drives and make them RAID 0 for the first pair, then RAID 1 for the next 2 to mirror the first RAID 5 pair. This is MUCH more stable and able to handle changes easier. It is called RAID 10, and although an old spec, is better than RAID 5.

Look into Acronis True Image backup (www.acronis.com), it is the most recommended program for backing up totally bootable compressed images to a remote server. So even though your server uses say 120 GB drives, you can backup several compressed images to a networked 250GB drive, which can now be gotten for under $100. So although you can invest the money in SAN disk arrays and NAS architectures, there is no need to. A simple "backup" server with two 250 GB drives (or more, as you need) can backup 1 TB of data on the servers, because it is compressed. And also backup up the daily incrementals and diffs to tape, that is the most efficient daily backup. Storage is now cheap, there is no need to invest in a pricy fiber optic arrray, that is for REAL-TIME, online storage, NOT for backup. Just plain IDE drives and tapes work fine for backups. They are reliable, and they work when you need them.

A small iSCSI SAN such as EMC's AX150i might be just the ticket http://www.emc.com/products/systems/clariion/ax150/index.jsp
You get up to 6TB and iSCSI connectivity - so you cann connect your existing servers by simply adding Microsoft's iSCSI initiator to each server. You can then assign storage dynamically.

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